PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW

PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW; Finding the Little Jokes That Pass Unnoticed

By VICKI GOLDBERG

Published: July 28, 2000

A famous photographer once said that photography is mostly luck, and isn't it funny how some photographers are so much luckier than others?

Elliott Erwitt is luckier than most. He operates from the seat of his pants or, perhaps more decorously, from the raveled edge of his wit. Erwitt is a street photographer, one engaged in the human spectacle as it passes by, not necessarily in the street. He likes any spot where humans and/or animals gather and can be caught out, or caught up, or caught in between or on the fly.

Mr. Erwitt is a witty man, or at least a witty photographer, a species that is actually quite rare. More consistently than almost anyone else he has managed to ferret out the little jokes life unknowingly, and irregularly, doles out and the sly or ridiculous or quizzical or charmingly impolite moments that tend to whiz across the horizon unnoticed.

For more than five decades he has been staking out museum sites and watching people interact with art (and other objects that museums show), as well as art occasionally interacting with people. Now his photographs on this theme, taken over several decades, are on view in a gallery where you can watch other gallerygoers mixing it up with pictures. ''Museum Watching'' by Elliott Erwitt, at the Edwynn Houk Gallery in Midtown, puts 25 images on the wall, some as large as 30 by 40; a book by the same name (published by Phaidon) has more than 150 illustrations.

Some of the images in both collections are among Mr. Erwitt's best and some are not, his best being hard to measure up to all the time. For a tiny taste of his sense of humor, check out the list of people he thanks in the book, which includes Gautama Buddha, Francisco Goya, Mrs. Kopplowitz, Ramses II and Rosetta Stone. Or look at the photograph of a naked bronze woman balancing on one foot atop a roof turret at the Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin, a crescent-shaped drapery billowing behind her and the moon, half-full in the night sky, balancing on her head. If the crescent-shaped drapery is an indication that she personifies Diana, goddess of the moon, the joke is particularly apt.

Mr. Erwitt documents museum visitors behaving in ways that deserve a smile or a hmmpf. At the Prado, where Goya's paintings of the clothed and the naked maja hang next to each other, seven men are studying the unclothed maja while a lone woman contemplates her fully dressed portrait. In the Museo de las Momias in Guanajuato, Mexico, a man and a woman engage in an earnest, gesticulating conversation, watched over by ranks of upright, naked, long-dead men, mummified with their jaws dropped open, screaming through eternity.

Sometimes it's light that behaves oddly rather than humans; a favorite effect of Mr. Erwitt's camera is to find museumgoers studying seemingly empty frames. Two adults and a child concentrate hard on a tiny white square in the middle of a large and elegantly framed blank, set in a gallery of 18th-century paintings. Elsewhere, reflections from windows have simply overridden all the artists' efforts to make recognizable landscapes. A wry art-world comment on these disappearing paintings is a photograph taken in a 57th Street gallery in the 1960's: two men stand before all-white canvases that appear to have emerged that way from the painter's brush rather than having been tricked into such purity by accidents of light.

Art became interactive long before the Internet, as you know if you have ever looked at a portrait that looked right back or ever been puzzled by a portrait's eyes that followed you around the room. Mr. Erwitt endows art with slightly more sinister intentions. A monumental stone guardian wielding a club menaces an anxious tourist who doesn't see him, and a wild man, half clad in an animal skin, looks down defiantly at two visitors staring up at him.

Artists require viewers; they have only a perilous hold on existence without them, but an audience expands their existence and their art's. So it is not surprising that painters have given us pictures of people looking at art. In the 18th century, Giovanani Paolo Panini and Johannes Zoffany painted art galleries where artworks swarmed up the walls and people sometimes looked on. Watteau painted a gallery sign showing the gallery in question crowded with paintings and clients. Daumier was intrigued by connoisseurs looking at art, Degas by Mary Cassatt taking a busman's holiday in the Louvre.

For, of course, artists are observers, and they avidly observe art as well as life; as long as there have been museums you could find painters in them studying and copying. By painting people looking at art they are commenting doubly on their profession. Photographers in museums add an extra wrinkle: their medium complicates the matter by bringing with it its vexed history as an art and its shifting relationship to other arts.

In the 19th century, photography looked more often at art itself than at people looking at it. As it was the greatest recorder of visual data in history, it introduced the world's art to enormous audiences that had never seen it before and documented the skeletons and porcelains and armor and jewelry and artifacts of every sort that museums eagerly displayed for the edification of the curious.

Even in that century there were some photographs of people looking at paintings. The next century had many more. Chim (David Seymour) took a famous photograph of Bernard Berenson studying Canova's sculpture of Paulina Borghese, really a portrait of the connoisseur living and working at his life. Henri Cartier-Bresson watched two little boys hungrily discovering female beauty (and anatomy) in the marble person of a classical Venus.

For the last 20 years or so, as photography gained widespread recognition as art and muscled its way into most museums, photographers have invaded museums to comment on art and its display and to look at lookers. Louise Lawler checked out the displays and storage rooms, Richard Ross photographed unpeopled museums and natural history dioramas, which form an intersection between reality and artifice. Thomas Struth's color pictures of people looking at paintings on museum walls or in churches have recently been shown and reproduced so often that you may think he owns the territory.

But Elliott Erwitt has occupied that ground for over half a century. In 1949, when the Metropolitan Museum was not so crowded, he took a photograph of a bronze statue of Diana firing her bow at a lone man retreating down an empty hall, and he has been checking out odd goings on in museums ever since. As he himself puts it in his book, ''In the end all museums are interesting. Even when they're not.''